


out of barren ground

by evitably



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: F/F, Identity Issues, Project Freelancer, Season/Series 10, Spoiler related warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-10
Updated: 2014-11-10
Packaged: 2018-02-24 15:53:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2587208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evitably/pseuds/evitably
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is loneliness in discovering your entire identity has been a lie. Loneliness, and pain, and a need to find someone who can help. Tex is no exception.<br/>(warnings and spoilers for the entirety of season 10. yes, including <em>that</em>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	out of barren ground

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [darkarcinc](http://darkarcinc.tumblr.com/) for the beta! All remaining mistakes are, as usual, wholly my own. If you spot anything or have any concrit, please let me know!

Texas manages to make it all the way to her quarters before she takes off her helmet and hurls it across the room. It clangs loudly against the wall, leaving a slight dent behind as it falls to the floor. Tex sneers at it; stupid piece of shit interior wall. 

The sneer fades from her face slowly, slowly, until her expression is blank and robotic, the way it usually is unless she makes a conscious effort to keep it human. 

_You were injured in the front lines,_ the Director told her when she'd woken up and found her memories curiously vague and her body made of metal. 

They'd taken her in, he'd said. They'd fixed her up. She was too precious to allow to die on the battlefield. Humanity needed her in Project Freelancer. 

_Try not to worry,_ the Counselor had said awkwardly when she studied her reflection in the mirror. _The robotics don't make you any less human._

Except that's not true, is it? There's a reason her face is expressionless, and a reason she can change her voice to sound like anything at will. She can change the reach of her limbs, the length of her neck. She can change the color of her hair by modifying the light frequencies she emits through the strands. 

And they still had the gall to call her _human_. 

Tex sits down on the edge of her bed. She doesn't know _why_ she needs a bed; it's not like she sleeps, after all. She doesn't even know why she was assigned a room in the first place. Maybe it's meant for appearances, or maybe the Director thought she'd want the privacy, but rather than feel thankful, Texas feels isolated. The room is too quiet, too bare, and too lonely. 

The emptiness leads her to doing something really fucking stupid: she takes Omega's data crystal out of storage, and inserts it into the port in the back of her neck. Tex doesn't know what to expect the entire eight seconds it takes him to boot himself awake (an eternity). 

Omega comes online and within a fraction of a second does what Tex should have expected of him: he laughs. He isn't kind and he doesn't try to be understanding; he laughs. 

"You knew," she accuses. 

"From the start," he says, hovering in front of her. "Poor little Agent Texas, not a real girl anymore." He tilts his holographic head, pretending to be deep in thought while they both know he's already chosen his next words. "Makes you wonder what Agent Carolina would think, doesn't it?" 

Tex pulls him out of her port as fast she can move her body, but it's not fast enough. _You should've killed her when you had the chance_ lingers in her pathways even after Omega's avatar blinks out of existence. 

"I should be looking for a way to kill _you_ ," she snarls. Her voice echoes off the walls, but it's still better than to have it reverberating inside her own head. 

For a second she can swear Omega is still online, because she can hear his faint laughter, then his voice saying, _wouldn't that mean learning how to kill yourself?_

If Tex had any tear ducts, she'd be crying. Instead she opens her mouth (tiny metal hinges moved by electricity produced by a power source at the bottom of her torso), and laughs. 

She laughs for what feels like forever, except is really only seconds, and at the end of them she's surprised to find herself sobbing. 

There aren't any tears, of course. There's no emotional release born of chemicals. 

It's not like Texas was ever truly human, and neither is the monster that shares her head. 

* 

The night shift on Mother of Invention only maintains a skeleton crew. Tex knows exactly where to go if she wants to avoid them on her way to Carolina's room. 

Carolina opens her door a few moments after Tex knocks, sleep-rumpled and wearing a gray sweatshirt and knee-length, dark green shorts. She squints. 

Tex isn't sure whether Carolina is squinting the bright lights in the corridor or at Tex herself. But she's blinking, and then her eyes focus on Tex, and she says, "It's the middle of the night." 

Tex moves into the darkened room; once she's inside, she pulls on Carolina's arm and gets her away from the door and the corridor and the out of the light. 

Behind them, the door slides shut. 

Some short time after being installed in Project Freelancer as an active agent, Texas realized how much better her eyesight was than others'. Not only could she see much farther, but she could also see much better when it was dark. 

In the relative darkness of Carolina's room, where Carolina might only see shapes and outlines, Tex sees everything around her with perfect clarity. 

"What the hell?" Carolina says, and pulls her arm away from Tex's hold; Tex is surprised she allowed it for that long in the first place. She looks Texas over, eyes lingering on the pale patches on Tex's knees and shoulders. "Why are you so dusty?" 

Tex shrugs. "Didn't want to get seen." 

"You went through the maintenance shafts?" 

"And air ducts." 

After a pause, Carolina asks, "What do you want?" 

"What, I can't want to see you?" 

Carolina looks at her. Somehow it comes across as exasperated; weary. Tired. 

The thing is, Tex likes Carolina. She's not sure how that's possible, considering that she's a goddamn computer program living inside a robot body, but back when she still thought she was just a normal woman inside a robot body, she'd casually asked the Counselor if he thought she could still experience attraction. 

( _Still_. Hah.) 

Even by Tex's standards the Counselor had been very quick to answer _no_. 

She'd said, "Oh, okay," and left the room. 

Except the Counselor had been wrong. Tex was attracted to Carolina. 

And now, when Tex is looking at Carolina, at her red, messy hair and green eyes surrounded by dark circles, at her pillow-creased face, she sees the Director in her features. She wonders: did the Director ever tell Carolina know what Texas is? 

Should Tex tell her? 

Carolina shifts under her gaze, minutely, almost unnoticeable. Tex knows she's making her uncomfortable with her staring, but she can't help but look for Allison in the planes of Carolina's face. 

The shape of the eyes, maybe? The chin? Carolina's hair is straight, and so was Allison's. So is Tex's. 

She's trying to see if she can find herself. 

"What's wrong with you?" Carolina asks. 

"Nothing," she says. 

They both know she's lying. 

And even though she can see both the Director's face and her own in Carolina's, Tex finds that she's attracted to her, still. 

Whenever Carolina's around, Tex can't help but react to her; she wants to show off, she wants to be closer, she wants Carolina to _acknowledge_ her. Sometimes the feeling is so strong that she wants to live inside Carolina's skin. 

(She realizes: she's an AI. She _can_.) 

Tex never could figure out why she and Carolina seemed to gravitate to each other. She's starting to understand now. 

She asks, "Do you ever miss your family?" 

Carolina says, "That's none of your goddamn business." 

Tex shrugs. She can't tell if Carolina knows whose face it is that she's wearing. Without her armor, Tex almost looks the way Allison did when she'd been twenty. Carolina wouldn't have even been conceived yet. 

"Why are you here, Texas?" 

"I couldn't sleep," she says. 

"So you came to me." 

"Who else is there?" 

Carolina keeps silent, presses her lips together. She knows just as well as Texas there is nobody else. 

"You can go back to sleep if you want," Tex says. "If you don't mind me staying." She watches the bend of Carolina's neck as she nods, and at the sway of her hips as she walks back to bed and slips under her covers. Once she's in bed, she curls up on her side and faces the wall, presenting her back to Tex. 

Tex is intimately familiar with the curve of Carolina's back; she knows what the ridges of her spine feel like under her fingertips, has run her hands along the dip of her waist and the contours of her muscles. 

She looks down at her hands. At her fingers, at her fingertips. They're printless. 

Tex isn't sure what sort of wiring the Director had done behind the Counselor's back, but for all that she's a robot, Tex's body functions in some very human ways. 

(She tries not to think about that.) 

She doesn't know how attraction works for people whose bodies are made of flesh and blood, and if it's as overwhelming for them as it is for her. And she wonders: how much of what she feels is emotions she's developed on her own, and how much of it is based on the Director's memories of a dead woman's affection for their daughter? 

"Hey, Carolina," she says. "D'you mind if I come over?" 

Whatever the origin of her attraction is, she doesn't want to be alone. 

Carolina turns away from the wall and faces Tex. Her eyes are open, unblinking, the way she looks at a problem she needs to solve and hasn't figured out yet. Tex can sympathize. 

"How comes you're asking?" 

Tex smiles crookedly. "That's the polite thing to do, isn't it?" 

"You didn't ask before." 

"No," Texas says. "I guess not." Maybe she should've. 

Tex's relationship with Carolina is a complicated one. For all that Tex tries to show her support, for all that Tex admires Carolina's steadfastness and resourcefulness and honest-to-God loyalty, Carolina always seems to take anything Tex does as a challenge. 

But Texas is better. She's quicker, she's stronger, she's meaner. 

And Carolina can't forgive her for that. 

Not even after the first kiss, that first time Carolina slammed Tex against a locker and tried to loom despite being shorter. Not during sex, when Tex tried to gentle the atmosphere and only ended up leaving bruises along Carolina's hips; not after, when they lay tangled, Tex listening to Carolina's ragged breaths and running her palms across Carolina's back in soothing circles. 

Tex shouldn't have simply followed Carolina's lead. She should've asked. 

"Well?" Carolina says. "Are you coming?" 

She does. She picks up her legs and pads across the small room to Carolina's bed, and sits at the foot of it. The thin mattress sinks beneath her weight, and as she scoots back to lean against the wall, Tex takes care not to bang her head against the empty upper bunk. 

She finds the silence easier to bear in Carolina's room than her own; Mother of Invention is never completely quiet, not even during night shift, but when your only companions are the buzz of the darkened headlights and the soft humming of the engines, it's easy to get lost in grief. The sound of Carolina's breathing (calm, measured, awake) helps. 

Texas doesn't breathe. She doesn't have lungs. She's never _had_ lungs. Being alone in her room felt like she was in a tomb. 

She pulls her knees up against her chest, wrapping her arms around them, and listens. 

Carolina stretches. Her toes brush Tex's ankles with the gentle hiss of skin against bedding, and then Carolina's foot touches Tex's, and neither of them draw back. 

"Why did you come, Texas?" Carolina asks. Her tone is gentle. Soft. 

Caring. 

And Tex discovers that she's terrified. "You keep this asking thing up, and I'll think you care." 

Carolina shifts her foot against Tex's, and whether by purpose or not, the contact between them is greater now. 

"And if I do?" 

Tex's smile is small, and sharp, and closer to a grimace. "You shouldn't." 

Carolina pulls her foot away from Tex's, and sits up. "What the hell?" 

"Just sayin'." 

"You come here in the middle of the night, wake me up, say some utter bullshit, then expect me not to ask what the fuck is going on?" She's squinting at Tex. "What the hell, Texas?" 

Tex regards her silently for a long moment. It dawns on her that she shouldn't have come here. She shouldn't have given into the hope that Carolina would somehow make it all better. 

If Carolina does know who and what Texas is, then she's a damn good actor. If she doesn't ... She doesn't finish the thought. 

If she doesn't, then there's no way Tex is going to hurt her by telling. 

"I should go," she says. 

She shouldn't have come. 

Tex pushes herself to the edge of Carolina's bed, then up to her feet, and all the while she doesn't look at Carolina. Her guilt gnaws on her right next to her power source. 

Carolina catches her by the arm. "What happened?" she asks. 

Tex turns to her, looks down to where Carolina's fingers encircle her wrist, and then farther down to where her blankets pool in her lap. She doesn't want to look at Carolina's face, doesn't want to see the betrayal she knows she'll find there. It's Tex who's been trying to build trust between them, after all. Not Carolina. 

But she looks up. Looks right into Carolina's eyes, and the longer Tex keeps quiet, the more Carolina's mask of indifference covers her face. 

Tex crouches on one knee, putting herself at eye level with Carolina. She puts her hand on top of Carolina's to disentangle her fingers, and kisses the back of Carolina's hand right below the knuckles. 

And then she lets it go. 

She keeps her eyes on Carolina's as she rises back to her feet. She needs to leave now, before she does anything else stupid, but Carolina's still looking at her, and Tex can't read her face anymore. 

So she puts her palm against Carolina's cheek and, bending over, presses another kiss to her temple. "I'm sorry," she murmurs into Carolina's hairline. 

And when she leaves for her room to think about what to do next, neither of them says goodbye.


End file.
